Art or Commerce?

Jeff Koons, the ultimate eighties art star, opens his first show of the nineties this month in New York. And the art-imitating-life exhibition features Koons in explicit embrace with his new wife, Italian politico and ex—porn queen La Cicciolina. Is he a fraud or deadly serious? Anthony Haden-Guest reports on the rise of Kitschy, Kitschy Koons.

Their fingers were tangled up on a tablecloth only a bit whiter than her blond hair. Her eyes were as blue as the Mediterranean slurping a couple of hundred yards away, and her eye makeup was much bluer. Cicciolina’s real name is Ilona Staller, and she is now Mrs. Jeff Koons. The artist unsoldered his hand and began fondling her thigh.

This was in the middle of August, and I was sitting with the couple, along with Koons’s secretary/translator, Marina—he has no Italian, Ilona only rudimentary English—in the Hotel Ariston, a fin de siècle hulk in Lido di Camaiore, near the Italian Riviera, and the eyes at neighboring tables were swiveling over as regularly as if they were on automatic pilot. As an ex-porno queen and a Radical Party parliamentary deputy, Cicciolina has one of the most recognizable faces in Italy. Jeff Koons’s artworks—which will be seen at New York’s Sonnabend Gallery this month—seem likely to make her equally a byword in the United States.

At thirty-six, Jeff Koons has become the most lionized and reviled American artist since Andy Warhol and Julian Schnabel. His last one-man show, in 1988, contained such pieces as huge ceramic sculptures of the Pink Panther dolefully clutching a centerfold cutie pie, and a reclining Michael Jackson in whiteface with his pet chimpanzee, Bubbles. The avant-garde critic Peter Schjeldahl rejoiced in “Koons’s accurate blend of aesthetic perfect pitch and blazing sociological significance,” while Hilton Kramer, a conservative modernist, saw nothing less than a willful “desecration of art, and that is why so many people love it.” The show netted the artist more than $3 million. Many doubted whether Koons had the stuff to take things much further. They were wrong.

Koons, who could have sold such pieces from now till Magic Kingdom come, is a risktaker. “He lays it on the line,” says a painter friend, Andy Moses. Koons’s current work was inspired by Ilona Staller’s pornografia—both her photographic work and her performances in which she sings and dances naked. “Ilona uses her body in the way another artist uses a paintbrush or a chisel,” Koons told me. His manner is puppyish, urgent; his eyes have an earnest glow. He speaks with the soft monotone of a theological seminarian. “She uses her genitalia. And she communicates a very precise language with her genitalia.”

Just what do Ilona’s genitalia say?

Marina, the interpreter, a fine-boned Venetian with an expression at once alert and baffled, gave a nervous giggle.

“The vocabulary tells you that you can find a lot of beauty in life. You must embrace life. And there’s no reason not to have confidence. Life can be really beautiful!”

Cicciolina was listening to her husband’s translucent abstractions placidly. I had been a bit skeptical about Ilona Staller, who is a few years older than her rich and famous husband, and whose whole business had, after all, been a matter of faking it, but I found her completely engaging. She drank it in as Koons called her “the Eternal Virgin.” She was wearing a floor-length dress of white silk, which Koons had bought her in Japan and which seemed a bit show-bizzy for the early-afternoon sun, but Koons told me that his wife was pregnant, and that the dress was loose.

“I like to wear jeans. I could wear them undone,” Ilona told me. Marina had apparently advised against it. Ilona gave a silvery, girlish laugh. Marina slipped Cicciolina a glass of wine. Koons caught the move, and was annoyed. “I told you, Marina,” he said. “Ilona can’t drink.” Nor will she take aspirin. Neither of them smokes. “I like smoking,” Koons told me fretfully. “Good-bye, mio amore,”Ilona said, leaving the table for her room.

Koons and I went to the car; he wanted to check on the marble sculptures being carved in the tiny town of Pietrasanta, a few miles from the hotel. They will be in the Sonnabend show alongside work I have not, at the time of writing, seen: glass pieces, being molded for him on Murano, an island in the Venetian Lagoon; paintings, which is to say images from photographic transparencies silk-screened onto canvas, which are being done in Paris; and polychrome sculptures, which are being carved in Germany. These include small wood pieces done in Mannheim and large pieces made of a synthetic in Oberammergau. Recently he had been driving four hundred miles a day.

Koons still has a place in Manhattan, but he and Ilona now live in Munich. His pieces are being fabricated under his obsessively detailed supervision in editions of three, plus an artist’s proof. Selections will appear in future shows in Los Angeles, London, Cologne, and Hong Kong. In Koons’s car, along with the Super VHS he is using to record processes of manufacture, is a visual file. It includes technical drawings, tear sheets of Ilona from hard-core magazines, and posed pictures of the pair of them. “These were for the glass pieces,” he told me, flipping through. “They are Kama Sutra-style, with Ilona and I together in different environments. They are very beautiful.” Unfortunately, the beauty has been a bit lost on some of the workmen in Italy and, especially, in Germany, where their main livelihood is working for churches. Complainers were taken off explicit work. Koons said, “I’ve set them to carving puppies.”

We arrived at Franco Cervietti’s marble workshops. Henry Moore had pieces carved here. The day before, Jeff and Ilona had encountered Fernando Botero, the most famous law-abiding son of Medellín, Colombia, checking on one of his glandular odalisques. Everywhere modern dignitaries and naked women were cheek by marble jowl. A boulder-size head of Saddam Hussein (paid for, but uncollected) loomed over an ordinary-size George Bush close to a sculpture of Jeff and Ilona in unclothed, upper-torso embrace.

Cicciolina’s proximity to the Iraqi despot was pointed. Just days after the announcement that she and Koons were to marry she publicly offered to bed Hussein if it would help settle the Gulf crisis. The offer got no feeler from Baghdad, but generated tons of predictable press. Koons is said to have been hurt, and for that, or another, reason, he broke off the engagement, saying, “Our life-styles are so different.” “Jeff gets a little jealous,” Cicciolina told a British reporter. “He wants to marry Ilona Staller and Cicciolina and stop me being Cicciolina. But he can’t do that.” Koons is a man of formidable will, though. Cicciolina retired, and the marriage went ahead as planned last June.

We walked out to look at a completed Koons sculpture in the sun-flecked yard. “It’s my self-portrait,” Koons said. The actual carving has been done by a craftsman, which is not unusual, except that artisans carving a Rodin, say, or a Henry Moore would be working from clay or plaster models whereas the Koons self-portrait is copied from photographs according to his minute, ongoing instructions. Koons, who works out every detail in advance, had chosen a Turkish marble for the piece. “I don’t like the local marble,” he said. “It’s chalky. It’s not uplifting.” The Turkish marble is very white, with a faint pink flush, and can take a high, waxy polish. The base has been carved into some New Agey crystals, and the idealized head seems to belong in some nineteenth-century poet’s corner, apart from touches of detail, such as a hairstyle that belongs less on Parnassus than on MTV. “The King,” Koons explained. “Elvis.”

Koons’s closest friends have said that if Jeff Koons could be anybody other than Jeff Koons, it would be Elvis. Or, possibly, Michael Jackson. Koons himself says he “wants to communicate with the mass unconscious.”

I contemplated the bust of Koons. “What were you thinking of when the photograph was taken?” I wondered.

“Having anal sex with Ilona,” Koons explained. As with all of his Bad Boy pronouncements, it was said with neither a wink nor a nudge, more a mellow solemnity. Koons talked about his carved countenance with peculiar objectivity. “It’s lost its desire for power. But it still wants to lead. For me, this is the real perversion. It’s about as perverse as things get. To know one’s limitations, and still want to lead people. But it’s always your own ego.”

The abstractions shimmered around the marble head. “A lot of people are going to think this is the way you really feel,” I observed.

“I do feel this,” Koons said. He joined in my startled laughter.

The artist Peter Halley, a longtime gallery stablemate, wonders, half humorously, if Koons is turning into a sort of a Salvador Dali. Which would make Ilona the new Gala. Koons himself frequently refers to Dali, who also combined super-salesmanship with a fairly impenetrable messianic metaphysic. Lovers and loathers of Koons’s work often use oddly parallel terms. They talk of his cynicism, “irony,” manipulation, his hunger for hype and money, the Warholesque games he plays with the most unnerving kitsch. So zestfully does Koons surf the shock waves that I feel a bit of a spoilsport to suggest he might be something even more aggravating: perfectly serious.

The first artwork Jeff Koons remembers exhibiting was an oil “in the manner of Watteau.” This pastiche of the eighteenth-century master was hung in the window of Henry J. Koons Interiors, his father’s store in York, Pennsylvania. “My father decorated in many different bourgeois-class styles,” Koons says. “Anything from French Provincial to modern or Colonial. What had an effect on me was that it was an artificial environment. One room in the store would be an artificial living room. You’d go down the hall and into an artificial kitchen . . . a sitting room . . . a den.”

At home Koons’s Lutheran parents hung the kind of work “that comes from a store that sells paintings not from a gallery,” but in his own store Henry Koons proudly showed his son’s work. “My father started selling my paintings for hundreds of dollars when I was nine years old. These horrendous paintings. This gave me a tremendous amount of confidence. It was very sweet of my father. I received a lot of love when I was a child.”

Henry and Gloria Koons saw to it that their only son—they have one daughter—took art classes from the age of eight. In his teens he went to the Maryland Institute College of Art, then the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied under Ed Paschke, an artist of lurid, controlled excess and a leader of the Chicago Imagist school. The painter Donald Baechler was at Maryland with Koons. He says Koons was the best draftsman at school. Koons himself describes his work of the time as “stylized landscapes. Or a dream that I had the night before. It was very sexual, some of it.” Paschke notes that there was sometimes something quasi-religious about the imagery, and that a few years ago his former student sent him “a catalogue of religious statuary” in the mail.

It was with Paschke that Koons explored Chicago’s netherworld. “We went to this midget bar where everything was for small people,” Koons tells me. “And a topless bar where all the girls were tattooed. It was visually very exciting.” After listening to Patti Smith on a late-night radio show, he hitchhiked alone to New York. He returned to pack up some things, then moved to Manhattan. It was around New Year’s Day 1977.

He quickly abandoned pencil and brush. “I decided to Enter the Objective Realm,” Koons says, pronouncing the words with airy capitals. In the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, Koons bought inflatable plastic flowers, blew them up, and set them on mirrors in his apartment on East Fourth Street. Alan Jones, an art writer who arrived in Manhattan the same month as Koons, describes the place as “like a huge installation. There were inflatables everywhere, floor to ceiling, including a rabbit.”

Koons supported himself by working at the Museum of Modern Art selling memberships. “He used the museum as a laboratory,” Jones says. “He wore a floppy tie made from a bathroom sponge. Groups of little old ladies would come up to him looking for directions, and they would all go home with Sustaining Memberships. It was this seduction.” “I really enjoy sales,” Koons explains. “So I would dress things up in a little razzle-dazzle. I doubled the membership in 1978, ’79. I brought in a patron a day. Sales and directing is very important in my art.”

MOMA’s hierarchy, nonetheless, looked on Koons with ambivalent eyes. “Mrs. Rockefeller appointed me senior representative of the Museum of Modern Art,” Koons says, but admits that another of MOMA’s grandees telephoned him prior to a visit by some Soviet dignitaries, politely indicating that it would be O.K. if Koons took a really long lunch hour that day.

“I had no problems with that,” Koons tells me, his strength being his ability to take the positive view. It was necessary, too, because breaking into the Manhattan art world wasn’t proving easy. “He was always a bit the outsider,” says Alan Jones. He made a few close friends at the museum, like Harvey Tulcensky, another young artist, with whom he would discuss such favorite reading as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer, while drinking a great deal of beer. The Kierkegaardian seduction was of an intellectual sort. Targets of a more old-fashioned nature included a young woman in the MOMA registrar’s office, Valerie Smith. “We were drinking in the bar underneath where I lived on 108th Street,” Smith says. “I was with my boyfriend. Jeff, who was quite drunk, told my boyfriend that he wanted to fuck me.” She mimed flying fists. “Bottles and glasses were everywhere.”

In 1979, Koons moved from the Lower East Side to a trim high rise on West Sixteenth. The jungle colors and the inflatables were exchanged for an antiseptic venue, with white walls and ceiling, a dark-blue wall-to-wall carpet, and little else, apart from his new work: mostly factory-fresh kitchen appliances, sometimes half in their cases, sometimes attached to fluorescent tubing. Those outside the world of avant-garde art (who only accepted Cubism, say, because of decades of high prices) would write such work off as mockery or fraud. Yet even within the art world there was puzzlement. Why a Dada retread sixty years after Duchamp declared that his store-bought urinal and bottle rack were Art? Jerry Joseph, who now owns Jerry’s, the art-world restaurant in SoHo, showed one of Koons’s appliance pieces at a small gallery he owned. “People refused to look at it. They just laughed,” he says.

Koons was undeterred. Valerie Smith, who had become a curator at Artists Space, showed a triple-stacked vacuum-cleaner piece. She remembers Koons’s coming in every day while the show was being installed, and polishing his piece hour after hour. Wrenched from their humdrum contexts, the appliances had an inhuman allure. “Walking into the Koons aesthetic was exhilarating,” says Jeffrey Deitch, then a critic, now a leading art consultant. “It was about immortality. Newness. There was this weird hygienic feel. It was the cleanest place I have been in in my whole life.” Alan Jones says, “Jeff would tell me endlessly, ‘I’m draining the sexuality out of my work! I’m draining the sexuality out of my work!’”

Art-world lift-off is almost always generated by the same force: gossip amongst other artists, which quickly reaches the flapping ears of dealers, collectors, and writers. There was a buzz about Jeff Koons, and studio visitors included the powerful Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger, the American collector Patrick Lannan, and the Italian writer and budding dealer Annina Nosei. Other visitors were fellow artists, such as Julian Schnabel—“I thought the work had something,” Schnabel says—who was followed by David Salle. In due course, Schnabel and Salle’s dealer, Mary Boone, showed up. “I liked what I saw,” Boone says. “I decided to give him a show.”

But something happened before: Julian Schnabel’s first solo show, the wildly publicized “plate paintings.” It was the beginning of the Eighties Art Boom, and, more to the point, the beginning of the hegemony of a sort of work very different from Koons’s.

Mary Boone postponed Koons’s show, and he quit the gallery. The dealer and the artist differ over the reasons for their rift, but not that much. She says he was a young man in much too much of a hurry. He says, “It was generally known that Neo-Expressionism was grabbing hold, and I could see that my work was going to be totally in the background. Mary just wasn’t going to be supporting it.”

Koons walked out in March of 1981 and went into a group show at Annina Nosei’s new gallery. A piece of his—two vacuums, encased and illuminated, one on top of the other—sold for $4,500. Nosei got a letter from Koons that June. He was asking about his “career.” Nosei says, “I was appalled—this was when people still talked about their art, not their careers. Jeff was ahead of his time.”

Koons was out of the gallery after two months. “I didn’t leave Annina,” he says. “She told me to get lost.”

Jeff Koons was already washed up with two major SoHo galleries. There were various conventional routes he could have taken. He could have tried for a SoHo gallery willing to buck the Neo-Expressionist fashion. He could have fished for a grant. He didn’t need a grant, though. Koons had already made a move anathema to Bohemia. He had gone to Wall Street.

Koons’s five-year career in commerce has now become part of the dark lore of the Art World of the Eighties, as legendarily crass as the tableau vivant “masterpieces” at Saul and Gayfryd Steinberg’s birthday whoopee or Alan Bond’s leveraged buy-up of van Gogh’s Irises. The truth is more complex.

Koons threw himself into selling, just as he had done at MOMA, starting with some of the same contacts. He sold Salvador Dali prints, he sold mutual funds, he worked the phones for “boiler rooms” and prestige firms. There was a dicey period when he lost his apartment for nonpayment of rent—“I went to stay with my folks in Florida”—but soon he was back and at full throttle. “By the time I met him, his reputation preceded him,” says Andy Moses, another young artist trying to make himself loft money in commodities. “He was top salesman where we were working two months running. He loved cotton. Its materiality. He would tell his clients, ‘Cotton is light . . . it’s fluffy . . . you can’t get hurt by cotton . . . ’ ”

Tulcensky and Moses both talk of Koons’s difficulty in unwinding after work and the eerie closeness he managed to achieve with his unseen clients. Koons often seduced himself too, and would plunk his winnings down on cotton, only to watch the board wipe him out. “He would go into deep depressions when things went down,” Andy Moses says. “Such bad depressions that I wouldn’t expect to see him the next day. But by the next morning he would always have turned it all around.”

Koons went on to Smith Barney, where he was promoted twice. Years later, an interviewer attacked him at the Chicago Art Fair for making so much money out of his art. Koons disagreed. Going into the art world had been a sacrifice, he said. As usual, he wasn’t joking.

Focused as he was on business, Koons was half in, half out of the art world. “He was still the new boy in town. The others made him feel very uncomfortable,” says Colette, the French-born multimedia artist. “I found him very shy and very different.”

Colette and Koons began dating. “The other artists kept on saying, ‘What are you doing with that loser?’ ” she remembers. “ ‘That beer-drinking arse-hole.’ ” She put him in a homemade soft-porn art video anyway, although Koons appears only in the first ten minutes. Colette is bare-bosomed in her bath. Koons, in a gray suit and tie, is sitting decorously on the corner of the tub, leafing through a magazine. He disappears for the rest of the film, as if he didn’t quite fit in with the (harmless) fun.

Sometimes he dined with the very successful artist David Salle, and Salle’s girlfriend, the dancer Karole Armitage. “He really needed friends,” says Armitage, adding that it was as if “he had gone into hibernation—like a mad scientist.”

By 1983, Koons was absorbed in the ideas that would be the basis for his next body of work. One day his new girlfriend, Lizz Lambert, a nineteen-year-old design student from Parsons, found him bent over the greenish-blue paper used to back fishtanks. “He was drawing a circle,” Lambert says. The idea was Equilibrium. He agrees, reluctantly, that his own equilibrium may have been on his mind. But like such High Victorians as G. F. Watts —who made artworks called Physical Energy and Hope—Koons got off on highly charged abstractions. His idea was to set a (real) basketball afloat in the middle of a liquid-filled glass tank, and that it should stay there, hovering in aqueous space, if not in perpetuity, then at least for a long stretch of museum time. “I worked with over fifty physicists,” he says, noting that one of them was the late Dr. Richard Feynman, Nobelist and author of pawky best-sellers, whom Koons had telephoned after reading that the scientist had an interest in art.

They tried solution after liquid solution. Sooner or later, though, the basketball would always end up on the bottom of the tank. “I could have worked with oils,” he says. “But I wanted the womblike situation of water. We realized in the end that it was unachievable. But I went for it. I pushed it to the limit.”

The Equilibrium show was at a store-front gallery in the East Village called International with Monument. It included several of the basketball pieces, and such other despairing comments on the theme as life rafts and inflatable vests cast in bottom-of-the-ocean-ready bronze.

Koons did not expect the show to be a success. But a success it was, of a sort. The respected collectors Eugene and Barbara Schwartz bought the bronze life jacket for $4,000. “It had cost me $8,000 to fabricate,” Koons says. “I sold the life raft for $8,000. It had cost me $20,000.” So his labors on Wall Street, from which he had now retired, were not wasted.

Koons’s next show was a characteristically abrupt change and demanded a further outlay. It was financed by International and a Los Angeles dealer, Daniel Weinberg. Koons cast various objects in stainless steel, including a travel bar, a decanter set, and a seven-piece model train, in which each compartment was a decanter of Jim Beam whiskey. In stainless steel the works looked icily, repellently seductive. Koons called the show “Luxury and Degradation.” Amongst interested visitors was the SoHo dealer Ileana Sonnabend.

The East Village art boom was sputtering out, and International with Monument shuttered. Koons, along with such other gallery artists as Peter Halley and Ashley Bickerton, and together with Meyer Vaisman, one of the gallery’s painter-directors, was courted by many dealers. They decided to show with Sonnabend. It was carefully thought out.

The Romanian-born former wife of Leo Castelli has her gallery above his on West Broadway, and some of the shows that she has given are part of contemporary-art history. This could be said of a group show she mounted in 1986 with Koons, Halley, Bickerton, and Vaisman. Amongst the most talked-of pieces in the show was Koons’s glimmering cast of an inflatable bunny. Called Rabbit, it was soon nicknamed “the Brancusi Bunny.” It was, of course, a direct descendant of the blow-up bunny with which Koons had decorated his first apartment.

The successors to the Neo-Expressionists had arrived, Jeff Koons most noisily. His comeback didn’t surprise him. “Of all my friends who have made it, Jeff has changed the least,” says Andy Moses. “I think he was always a star in his own mind. He didn’t need to make an adjustment.”

Soon after the group show, the organizers of a major art fair in the medieval German town of Münster asked Koons to create a piece. He decided to make a stainless-steel cast of a folksy bronze statue of a market-bound farmer that stands in a Münster square. The cast would replace the original for the duration of the show. “The piece was to be about Self-Sufficiency,” Koons says with the usual airy capitals. “But it was a total disaster. An industrial foundry made it in Germany. And when they pulled the stainless steel out of the oven, they banged it up against the wall while it was still molten. Every aspect was deformed. It was like Humpty-Dumpty.”

Koons was faced with the choice of pulling out of the art-star-studded event or “giving the piece radical plastic surgery. So we had a specialist brought in, who was a phenomenal man with steel. He could do anything.”

Koons is still not too happy about his steel farmer, but he learned something. He could go beyond copying an existing object. This was crucial as he set craftsmen to fabricating identical editions of pieces for his first one-man shows (they were set for Cologne, Chicago, and Sonnabend in New York).

The pieces were a fresh departure. The images Koons used were drawn from the childhood industry and the adult-leisure business. It’s a planetwide vernacular now, with the U.S. as prime producer. Think of Disney, soft toys, Hallmark cards, saucy postcards, airport-kiosk gew-gaws, and the long-haired trolls dangling in car windows, except edited, swollen hugely in size, and made in vivid, pristine ceramics or polychrome woods. The piece illustrating the announcement showed two young cherubs and a little boy pushing a beribboned pig. “That’s me,” Koons tells me of the boy. The piece is called Ushering In Banality.

“I want to see blood on the walls!” Koons told Alan Jones gleefully before the opening. “I want to see blood on the walls!” It was, indeed, a stunner. At a stroke, an earlier generation of Pop looked refined by comparison. Arty. “I saw the work first in small photographs,” Ashley Bickerton remembers. “I thought, Jeff has gone too far this time. Then I went to the opening. Wow! My chin hit my chest.” Hilton Kramer waxed wroth in his review, zeroing in on “objects that carry the love of kitsch to a new level of atrocious taste.” Friends and foes alike focused on the kitsch. Who can blame them? But Koons won’t accept this reading at all. “Everybody grew up surrounded by this material,” he says. “I try not to use it in any cynical manner. I use it to penetrate mass consciousness—to communicate to people. This is the only vocabulary that I know how to manipulate. If I could manipulate another vocabulary to communicate more clearly, I would. But this is the one I believe in.”

Unlike the Pop artists, that is to say, unlike even the spectrally chic Warhol, Koons is completely accepting of the visual dreck with which we are increasingly saturated. It is when he tries to put into words just what he is trying to communicate through this vocabulary that he gets a bit cloudy. “The individual just needs self-confidence in life—the self-confidence that cleverness is enough,” he says. “People should learn to embrace their own history.” Artists are seldom the best at explaining their work, of course. What I got from the work was a sudden rush of exhilaration and terror.

I ask Koons how he had made out on the spectacularly successful Sonnabend show. Money, unsurprisingly, was a bit of an abstraction, too. “It’s not about greed. It is about demanding to be taken seriously on a political stage. What I’m saying is that the seriousness with which a work of art is taken is interrelated to the value that it has. The market is the greatest critic.” Ileana Sonnabend says, “Jeff doesn’t understand money at all.”

But money, it turns out, was far from an abstraction to those with a claim on the images Koons used. First to sue was a photographer from Point Reyes, California, named Art Rogers. Koons turned an utterly unremarkable Rogers photograph of a couple grinning over eight puppies into a sculpture of horrible beauty. Rogers, who was paid “a few hundred dollars” for his picture, told me, his voice outraged, that he felt “violated.. .ripped off.” He is suing for “not less than $375,000.” Also suing are the syndicate that handles the comic strip “Garfield,” for unauthorized use of the dog, Odie, and MGM/Pathé, for use of the Pink Panther. As of this September, a photographer of a birthday card is claiming it is the source of Ushering In Banality.

Artists have frequently been sued for using protected material in their art. No artist has ever fought the case all the way. Koons says he will fight to the finish. Garfield’s attorney is nonplussed. “We didn’t want his profits,” he says. “We just wanted him to agree not to use our characters again. He wouldn’t sign. He said it would infringe on his creative freedom.”

One of the pieces in Koons’s Banality show was called Fait d’Hiver. It showed a half-naked dazzler on her back in the snow. A cartoony pig and penguin hasten to her assistance. The female torso had been borrowed from a magazine photograph. The photo was of a just-elected Italian deputy/porno star.

Cicciolina was born Ilona Staller in Budapest, Hungary, thirty-nine years ago. Her family is of German origin. Her mother, to whom she remains devoted, is a doctor. Ilona has very blue eyes, shaped like narrow leaves. Her pale hair and dark brows are “her hook,” according to Koons. “Like Andy’s platinum wig or Salvador Dali’s mustache.”

Ilona has two older brothers and an older sister. She says her father worked in the Ministry of the Interior, and the family was sufficiently well-to-do to pay for private lessons in piano, violin, ballet, and modern dance. She acquired the skills, but, she told me, “I was more interested in going to the disco.” By her mid-teens, she was a photographic model, and at the age of seventeen she moved alone to Rome.

Her skills were less helpful than perhaps she had hoped. “I found that people did not want to see me in concerts, playing the violin or the pianoforte,” she told me. “They wanted to see me nude.” She gave a tinkling laugh, and added, “It is very interesting. I like the nude. For me, it was easier to speak with my body than with words. A nude language.”

Soon Staller acquired both citizenship and her nickname, which means “the Dumpling.” Rome is a city where Nordic-looking blondes are treated with deference, and Cicciolina’s snow-maiden combination of audacity—one of her acts included dildos—with an odd purity quickly made her a star in a raw business.

Father Pierre Riques, who was Ilona’s parish priest in the Isola Farnese district some fifteen years ago, speaks of her dryly, but not harshly. “She was rather foolish,” he says. “She tried to come to church topless. I had to tell her this was not the best way to keep my congregation’s mind on their prayers. Afterwards, she would come quite decently dressed.”

Was her liberalism genuine?

“It’s partly a game. But it’s partly sincere,” he says.

Ilona Staller began to star in stage spectaculars, sometimes dancing and performing her own music, as if to justify those private lessons back in Budapest. She starred in several films, and exerted some control over their presentation. “I would dominate,” she explained. “It is always my own fantasy. I was never the victim.”

Was the man the victim?

She giggled. “Probably,” she said. But not abusively so. “Not dominatrice” she said. “Absolutely sweet. I dominate with sweetness.” With righteousness too. Amongst the porno films that Cicciolina made was an anti-AIDS film which, according to her, is one of the rare hard-core films to feature condoms.

For many Italian males Staller is simply a puttana, a tart, while the women’s movement is as split on the issue as American feminists are by Madonna. Ilona’s personality, though, has won a number of unlikely converts. “I was very prejudiced before going to see her,” says Dado Ruspoli, the Roman prince who is an unquenchable part of the world’s nightlife. “But she knows how to handle people. She conquered everybody.”

Staller’s brio put an idea into the mind of Marco Pannella, the leader of Italy’s Radical Party, a left alternative to the Communists. Many think that Pannella asked Cicciolina to join his roster of candidates as a cunning stunt, not dreaming that she would win.

She campaigned from a stage, naked apart from the snake that played a very active part in her performance. At the elections in June 1987, she won handily. The parliamentary immunity she gained was helpful with the carabinieri, but cut no ice with U.S. Immigration when she was offered, according to Screw magazine, a $65,000 fee for two weeks at a night spot on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She was later refused permission to enter New York for a single day while en route to the Caribbean.

Staller is resisting the increasing entreaties from her own party that she stand down before the next election, which is expected to be this coming spring.

Ilona had become aware of Jeff Koons early in 1989. Panorama, a popular Italian magazine, had run some pictures of his pieces, including Fait d’Hiver. A journalist had written that Cicciolina was the model. She had looked and decided that this was not the case.

“I first saw this photo of Ilona in Stern magazine in January 1988,” Jeff Koons says. “I thought, This is a beautiful woman. I didn’t know who it was. She had on this knitted dress, which was transparent and which you could see right through.” Koons slipped the image into his file. In due course, he collaged it into the overall image which would be turned into Fait d’Hiver. All that he would use were the torso and the dress.

Some months later Koons saw a picture on a porno-magazine cover. “I realized this was the same woman,” he says. “And when I looked inside I realized this was one of the greatest artists alive. She was able to present herself with absolutely No Guilt and No Shame. This put her in the Realm of the Eternal.”

Koons would often cite Cicciolina as an influence during the Banality-show furor, coupling her with Michael Jackson. In January 1989, he sent her a fax in Rome, suggesting that they work together. “We ended up not getting together until Easter weekend of ’89,” he says. He went to a spectacular in Milan that Cicciolina was performing in. “I was taken backstage to meet her before,” he says. “She had her top on, but she had no pants on. I enjoyed very much that she was standing there without any pants on. And I was attracted very much to her beauty in real life. The tone of her voice. I just realized the totality of her beauty.”

She agreed through an interpreter to work with him on a piece. She was to get her hourly model rate.

Jeff Koons’s Manhattan HQ is in Greenwich Village. There was a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph on the wall alongside a patterny painting by Christopher Wool. This was October 1989, and Jeff Koons was dragging out color prints in which he and Cicciolina are grappling. Young female interns were coping with the telephones.

“We shot these at two in the morning,” he told me. “This is the shot I’ve chosen. It’s advertising for a porno film I’m going to make with Cicciolina. Made in Heaven.” I studied the color pictures.

“This I like a lot because it reminds me of Michelangelo,” he said of one. “Adam touching the hand of God.” He and Cic-ciolina, he explained, are “the New Adam and the New Eve.”

“You don’t have an erection, Jeff,” I pointed out.

“This is Soft Porn,” he explained. “This isn’t Hard.”

The film, unlike the billboard, would be Hard. Penetration would occur? “Of course. Everything.”

Pieces of athletic equipment on the floor were for the program worked out for him by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Debbie, a trainer, visited him daily. “I’m not interested in the health side of it,” he said. “It’s in the service of the work.” The very least the New Eve deserved was a New and Improved Adam.

Soon after the Made in Heaven project was announced came the news that the artist and porn star were engaged. How had the proposal been made? “It was tragico,” Ilona said, trilling with laughter. A tragedy! “Because I spoke no English and Jeff spoke no Italian, so his secretary, La Signorina Marina, had to translate. When Jeff wanted to say, ‘Ilona, I love you!’ Marina translated it to me. Then I would say, ‘Jeff, I love you!’ Marina would say, ‘Jeff, Ilona says she loves you. . . ’ ”

He proposed during the Venice Biennale, appropriately, because a focal point of the festival was the photo-based sculpture of a naked Koons embracing his slightly less naked future wife. It is about as pornographic, to my eye, as the nymphs and satyrs gamboling on a Baroque wall.

The announcement of the engagement was greeted with some skepticism. I mentioned to Ilona that many felt the Heaven in which the match was made was for celebrities only. Ilona was unoffended. “No. This is not why we married,” she said, simply. “We married because we have so much in common.”

The wedding was in Budapest last June. A few American friends made it to Hungary for the ceremony. The first public appearance of the couple was at the opening of arbitrageur Asher Edelman’s museum in Pully, Switzerland, a week later. They then went to the dinner that the Swiss dealer Thomas Ammann gave for the AIDS charity AmFAR to launch the Basel International Art Fair. The New Adam and the New Eve moved through a white intensity of klieg wattage that left even such AmFAR supporters as Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn temporarily alone and palely loitering. It was then back to Munich, Venice, Oberammer-gau, and here, close to the marble yard of Pietrasanta.

We were down by the pool of the Hotel Aristón. The Koonses’ amorous, ceaseless cooing was beginning to make me feel very, well, single. Ilona had been telling me about her married life while her husband was out of earshot. “I have found a real partner. Especially sexually,” she told me. “Formidable!”

Neither Lizz Lambert nor Colette reports the same. But that wasn’t in the name of art. Was it?

“We want twins,” Jeff Koons said intently. “My father is a twin.”

He does not seem to expect Ilona to become a housewife—“She has other talents”—but it seems unlikely she can hit the campaign trail in March, so there would go the career in politics. Down by the pool, Ilona was frolicking in a one-piece bathing suit as pink as her incredibly pink nails while her husband was talking plans. “Greece is in the Mediterranean, isn’t it?” he asked. I remembered his telling me that he had picked the image of Saint John the Baptist from his file for the piece in the Banality show without knowing what it was. “I had a lot of Saint Johns,” he said. He later found the image was a Leonardo da Vinci. A very American artist, Koons.

Ilona got into the pool and scrambled onto a floating green Mutant Ninja Turtle. Not Leonardo, as it happened, but Donatello. It was a Koons spore. Outside on the beachfront, along with lurking paparazzi, I had seen plastic figures of Snow White, with the entry-wound mouth of a blow-up sex toy, and a huge inflatable giraffe. There was Koonsiana everywhere.

“I’m very disillusioned with the art world,” Koons told me. “I really am. Art lacks charisma. I try to create charisma, and I try to manipulate an audience, and I try to control this environment. But I’m very disillusioned.”

Koons thinks one way to achieve what he wants is finally to make Made in Heaven, which has been on hold since Sonna-bend balked at funding it. Ilona, I should say, is a bit less keen on the movie. “I want to grow,” she said, delicately. The movie, anyway, depends on the success of this current exhibition, as well as success in the court cases. Art Rogers, the “violated” photographer, for instance, won his suit. Koons appealed. The appeal is being ruled on this month, and even Koons’s worst art-world enemies should be praying that he prevails.

“I’m a very happy man,” Koons said. “I’m very, very happy. And the sculpture that I am most interested in is our child. I don’t believe that marble bust I made is my way to enter the Realm of the Eternal.” Those capitals again. “To me the only way to exist in the eternal is through biological sculptures.”

Ilona and Jeff clutched hands. The mundane wisdom would be that things were too hot not to cool down. But God knows this is not a mundane couple. Jeff Koons is an extraordinary artist. I have no idea what he will do next.